People may moan about old families, money, and influence, but a large portion of the blame lies in a culture which sees fit to appoint unqualified, unknowledgeable, sweet talkers to positions of responsibility, and moreover to even deny those positions to competent candidates.
I know, right? Pesky "freedom" and "personal responsibility." Can't have any of that!
There is just no way that the dumbed-down, "safe" fireworks allowed to be sold here are going to start a fire in the average neighborhood. And I guess you never thought about standing by with a fire extinguisher when you set some off (I do).
Seriously. Take your "there oughta be a law" attitude and move somewhere else. I don't need you as a neighbor.
Because you are a myopic idiot. The great evils forced on Americans by government are nearly always bipartisan efforts. Otherwise they wouldn't happen.
Then again, who am I to deprive you of your comfortable generalization? Go ahead and believe whatever you like, it's not like you vote here.
I'm still using an Audigy 2 ZS I purchased in 2004. My 2007-ish motherboard sound device is turned off in BIOS. Why? Two reasons:
1) Motherboard sound is full of noise and glitches (pops and clicks).
2) Even more importantly: The onboard sound hardware *actively interferes* with sound under Linux. I have to turn it off, or I have mysterious and disruptive sound problems. Such as fmod using 100% of CPU cycles.
I can only speculate on the real cause of #2, but if experience is any guide, it's due to half-baked hardware that only "works" with a Windows-only driver.
This is why I put "works" in quotes: Even when integrated sound hardware works under Windows, it doesn't necessarily work all that well. I bought the Sound Blaster because the integrated audio on the PC I built in 2003 was also flaky.
The Audigy 2 ZS works absolutely fine under Ubuntu, so that's what I use. Yes...... I have zero problems with this card and PulseAudio. But the onboard sound device is a piece of junk. Motherboard manufacturers throw in the cheapest junk they think they can get away with. They certainly don't give a damn whether it works in Linux.
You covered the main drawback to such monitors - price.
Did you also catch the insanely low refresh rate (25 or 41 Hz) and rather high 50 ms (or 25 ms, depending on how you measure) response time? Anything involving moving images would be a streaky, smeared mess. That said, it does seem odd that nothing similar is offered today for photo & graphic design folks.
Optical discs cost almost nothing to make, but the consumer has never seen the benefit. I don't recall game prices dropping substantially in the last 20 years. NES carts were usually around $40-$50, and the prices are the same or higher for today's DVD-ROM (or DVD-Wii, so to speak) games.
It's eerily parallel to the music world. CDs should have brought album prices down a lot, but it never happened.
Adjusting for inflation, prices have dropped overall, but not proportionately to the decrease in media cost.
It's nice they've developed a way to transfer data at ridiculous speeds, but it does the average user no good as long as we're using mechanical hard drives. Even a "mere" 1 gigabit network connection outstrips the ability of spinning platters to absorb it. I guess this Light Peak thing is aimed at the server market then?
If you're even mildly involved in real-life shooting, either as a hobby or professionally, you're going to spot a lot of gaffes.
I can understand simple continuity errors. By the time a film has been cut, edited, recut, edited again, Foleyed, CGI'd, etc. it's got to be difficult to keep track of whether the protagonist's gun should be empty. It doesn't take anything away to assume the hero simply reloaded offscreen.
But these things are a totally different matter: -The mythical "Glock 7" -The slow-motion sequence showing an entire round of ammunition going downrange, not just the projectile, -Ammo "cooking off" somehow acting the same as if it were confined in a barrel (I'm looking at you, "Paycheck!"),
And I can't count the number of movies/TV shows where -Someone "cocks the hammer" on a gun that doesn't HAVE a hammer, like a Glock.
We get it. You don't agree with Beck's opinions, so he shouldn't be on the list, even though you admit he is influential. This is what passes for "Insightful" here?
No no no...He takes the requirements from the customer and gives them to the engineers, so the engineers won't have to deal with customers. He has PEOPLE skills, dammit!
That this kind of regurgitated, thoughtless, statist propoganda can get rated "insightful" shows you what a +5 is worth around here. Which is why I started browsing at 0.
That's...kinda weird. Anyone tech-savvy enough to be buying bare HDD is just going to reformat it anyway, right?
I look at it like netbooks & laptops that inevitably come pre-configured with Windows and a ton of crapware: I may have little use for it, but there's nothing stopping me from wiping the drive & installing OS of my choice. If it lets them sell the machine more cheaply, under the fiction that the shovelware is "free advertising" for the vendors, it's a win for both me and the manufacturer.
Oh, except it's NOT a better deal. $100 is steep for only 500 GB. It would only look like a "deal" if you shop for components at Best Buy.
The original one. The character I remember most is the unnamed G-man. There was something jarring about his phrasing and the timing of his lines. He was a good example of "less is more" in characterization.
The unfortunate outcome of Thief 3 breathed new life into the Thief 2 fan mission community. Over 5 years after T3's release, you can still find more new T2 fan missions than T3 fan missions.
I think this is explainable by a few reasons:
The level editing tools for T3 are supposedly quite poor, compared to what exists for T2 (here I'm relying totally on hearsay, as I haven't the requisite patience to develop my own levels).
Also, there are major things missing in T3 that people had got used to in T1 and T2: no swimmable water, and no rope arrows.
Eidos devs reported that they simply could not get rope arrows to work, despite lots of effort, so we got those goofy Spider Man gloves. Apparently the Havok engine doesn't handle water immersion, thus the "fall into the water = die" at the harbor.
What's worse is front panel USB ports that are crammed together with their long axes aligned. If you have a slightly fat USB dongle/flash drive or, Glub forbid, USB-to-SD adapter, the neighboring USB port is completely blocked.
I'm looking at an HP DC5850 on my desk, which has the USB ports stacked (e.g. long axes parallel). That's the better way to do it.
I think they did the same thing with Guitar Hero 3. My system is hardly a lightweight, garnering a 5.7 overall score in Windows 7, with a 6.1 (!) in Memory. Dirty details:
And while GH3 under Windows XP (haven't tried it in 7 yet) runs acceptably, there's often hints of hitching in the animation. Turning off the crowds helps only a little. It definitely feels like it's being run in an emulator, or was at least ported with little to no optimization done.
The frustrating thing is, I know the consoles it was designed to run on are MUCH less beefy in hardware than my PC. True for GH World Tour as well, I'd wager.
The big publishers just don't care any more. Why should they? In the console world, they get to control both the software and the hardware (properly, the console mfg. controls the hardware, but the point is it's locked down and fixed-configuration).
Infinity Ward gave PC gamers the middle finger with Modern Warfare 2, and I see no reason things will get better. I would be surprised if they even bother with a Windows 7 version of Modern Warfare 3.
Slashdot Mirror
People may moan about old families, money, and influence, but a large portion of the blame lies in a culture which sees fit to appoint unqualified, unknowledgeable, sweet talkers to positions of responsibility, and moreover to even deny those positions to competent candidates.
You mean like Obama? I couldn't agree more.
I know, right? Pesky "freedom" and "personal responsibility." Can't have any of that!
There is just no way that the dumbed-down, "safe" fireworks allowed to be sold here are going to start a fire in the average neighborhood. And I guess you never thought about standing by with a fire extinguisher when you set some off (I do).
Seriously. Take your "there oughta be a law" attitude and move somewhere else. I don't need you as a neighbor.
Because you are a myopic idiot. The great evils forced on Americans by government are nearly always bipartisan efforts. Otherwise they wouldn't happen.
Then again, who am I to deprive you of your comfortable generalization? Go ahead and believe whatever you like, it's not like you vote here.
So can I stop undressing and getting sexually assaulted at the airport now?
I took not only Algebra II, but AP Calculus (AB) in high school. I never thought it made me all that special.
You're going to be in for a world of hurt if you hit college without Algebra II, if you want to do anything even vaguely technical.
It doesn't take a lot to look "good enough," when you're developing for a 42" display at 1920x1080 (a whopping 50-ish dpi!).
I'm still using an Audigy 2 ZS I purchased in 2004. My 2007-ish motherboard sound device is turned off in BIOS. Why? Two reasons:
1) Motherboard sound is full of noise and glitches (pops and clicks).
2) Even more importantly: The onboard sound hardware *actively interferes* with sound under Linux. I have to turn it off, or I have mysterious and disruptive sound problems. Such as fmod using 100% of CPU cycles.
I can only speculate on the real cause of #2, but if experience is any guide, it's due to half-baked hardware that only "works" with a Windows-only driver.
This is why I put "works" in quotes: Even when integrated sound hardware works under Windows, it doesn't necessarily work all that well. I bought the Sound Blaster because the integrated audio on the PC I built in 2003 was also flaky.
The Audigy 2 ZS works absolutely fine under Ubuntu, so that's what I use. Yes... ... I have zero problems with this card and PulseAudio. But the onboard sound device is a piece of junk. Motherboard manufacturers throw in the cheapest junk they think they can get away with. They certainly don't give a damn whether it works in Linux.
I always prefer the extremists on my side to the extremists on the other side too.
To borrow a turn of phrase, the important thing is that you've found a way to feel superior to both.
You covered the main drawback to such monitors - price.
Did you also catch the insanely low refresh rate (25 or 41 Hz) and rather high 50 ms (or 25 ms, depending on how you measure) response time? Anything involving moving images would be a streaky, smeared mess. That said, it does seem odd that nothing similar is offered today for photo & graphic design folks.
FWIW, review of the VP2290b here: http://www.trustedreviews.com/monitors/review/2004/06/30/ViewSonic-VP2290b-High-Resolution-TFT/p1
Optical discs cost almost nothing to make, but the consumer has never seen the benefit. I don't recall game prices dropping substantially in the last 20 years. NES carts were usually around $40-$50, and the prices are the same or higher for today's DVD-ROM (or DVD-Wii, so to speak) games.
It's eerily parallel to the music world. CDs should have brought album prices down a lot, but it never happened.
Adjusting for inflation, prices have dropped overall, but not proportionately to the decrease in media cost.
It's nice they've developed a way to transfer data at ridiculous speeds, but it does the average user no good as long as we're using mechanical hard drives. Even a "mere" 1 gigabit network connection outstrips the ability of spinning platters to absorb it. I guess this Light Peak thing is aimed at the server market then?
If you're even mildly involved in real-life shooting, either as a hobby or professionally, you're going to spot a lot of gaffes.
I can understand simple continuity errors. By the time a film has been cut, edited, recut, edited again, Foleyed, CGI'd, etc. it's got to be difficult to keep track of whether the protagonist's gun should be empty. It doesn't take anything away to assume the hero simply reloaded offscreen.
But these things are a totally different matter:
-The mythical "Glock 7"
-The slow-motion sequence showing an entire round of ammunition going downrange, not just the projectile,
-Ammo "cooking off" somehow acting the same as if it were confined in a barrel (I'm looking at you, "Paycheck!"),
And I can't count the number of movies/TV shows where
-Someone "cocks the hammer" on a gun that doesn't HAVE a hammer, like a Glock.
We get it. You don't agree with Beck's opinions, so he shouldn't be on the list, even though you admit he is influential. This is what passes for "Insightful" here?
No no no...He takes the requirements from the customer and gives them to the engineers, so the engineers won't have to deal with customers. He has PEOPLE skills, dammit!
Meh. I'm just glad they're still patching Windows XP.
That this kind of regurgitated, thoughtless, statist propoganda can get rated "insightful" shows you what a +5 is worth around here. Which is why I started browsing at 0.
That's...kinda weird. Anyone tech-savvy enough to be buying bare HDD is just going to reformat it anyway, right?
I look at it like netbooks & laptops that inevitably come pre-configured with Windows and a ton of crapware: I may have little use for it, but there's nothing stopping me from wiping the drive & installing OS of my choice. If it lets them sell the machine more cheaply, under the fiction that the shovelware is "free advertising" for the vendors, it's a win for both me and the manufacturer.
Oh, except it's NOT a better deal. $100 is steep for only 500 GB. It would only look like a "deal" if you shop for components at Best Buy.
one word: revenue.
Sure, but I have a hard time seeing how the Portuguese system enhances revenue to the State^H^H^H^H^H^H^H improves safety.
Not as long as ISPs offer most of us nothing better than high-latency 1.5 Mbit DSL, or low-rate cable. If we even get a choice of those two.
Oh, I forgot, the FCC is going to magically solve the last-mile (or last-500-feet) problem. Right, there you go.
The original one. The character I remember most is the unnamed G-man. There was something jarring about his phrasing and the timing of his lines. He was a good example of "less is more" in characterization.
The unfortunate outcome of Thief 3 breathed new life into the Thief 2 fan mission community. Over 5 years after T3's release, you can still find more new T2 fan missions than T3 fan missions.
I think this is explainable by a few reasons:
The level editing tools for T3 are supposedly quite poor, compared to what exists for T2 (here I'm relying totally on hearsay, as I haven't the requisite patience to develop my own levels).
Also, there are major things missing in T3 that people had got used to in T1 and T2: no swimmable water, and no rope arrows.
Eidos devs reported that they simply could not get rope arrows to work, despite lots of effort, so we got those goofy Spider Man gloves. Apparently the Havok engine doesn't handle water immersion, thus the "fall into the water = die" at the harbor.
Don't make me "tap" a button to perform a action. Who thought of that?
Word. I actually wore out a keyboard's "Shift" key (albeit a $12 Aopen, no big loss) with the stupid "sprint" tapping in Grant Theft Auto San Andreas.
Had I been sufficiently motivated, I guess I could have set up a macro to save wear on the Shift key, but I shouldn't have to.
What's worse is front panel USB ports that are crammed together with their long axes aligned. If you have a slightly fat USB dongle/flash drive or, Glub forbid, USB-to-SD adapter, the neighboring USB port is completely blocked.
I'm looking at an HP DC5850 on my desk, which has the USB ports stacked (e.g. long axes parallel). That's the better way to do it.
I think they did the same thing with Guitar Hero 3. My system is hardly a lightweight, garnering a 5.7 overall score in Windows 7, with a 6.1 (!) in Memory. Dirty details:
-Core 2 Duo E8500
-4 GB DDR3 1333 MHz (PC 10666) RAM
-GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512 MB (PCI Express 2.0 16x interface) video card
And while GH3 under Windows XP (haven't tried it in 7 yet) runs acceptably, there's often hints of hitching in the animation. Turning off the crowds helps only a little. It definitely feels like it's being run in an emulator, or was at least ported with little to no optimization done.
The frustrating thing is, I know the consoles it was designed to run on are MUCH less beefy in hardware than my PC. True for GH World Tour as well, I'd wager.
The big publishers just don't care any more. Why should they? In the console world, they get to control both the software and the hardware (properly, the console mfg. controls the hardware, but the point is it's locked down and fixed-configuration).
Infinity Ward gave PC gamers the middle finger with Modern Warfare 2, and I see no reason things will get better. I would be surprised if they even bother with a Windows 7 version of Modern Warfare 3.